At first she was crazy, but after a month at home Withy could speak and behave responsibly. She said she did not remember what had happened, but once she said, "When Jade found me." They asked what she meant and she did not answer. But Jade heard of this, and he went to the heyimas and talked to people there, telling them a true account. Then he left Chukulmas and went up on the Mountain to the Springs, and then went to live in the Lower Valley. He lived outside of Tachas Touchas as a forest-living person. He did not dance, and did not enter his heyimas. At the time of the Moon dancing he always went up into the southwest ranges. One time he did not come back. Withy lived in Chukulmas until she was old. She wore a mask outside the house to hide her face from children.

--from Always Coming Home

The science fiction and fantasy novels of Ursula LeGuin, b. Ursula Kroeber in Berkeley, Calif., Oct. 21, 1929, have won a wide audience. In her science fiction she examines contemporary problems by restating them in terms of other imagined worlds--for example, the possibility for perfect anarchic society, in The Dispossessed, (1974); and life in an androgynous world, in The Left Hand of Darkness, (1969). LeGuin is also the author of a fantasy series for children, the Earthsea trilogy, and has received many awards, including the Boston Globe-Hornbook Award for juvenile fiction (1968) and the National Book Award (1973) for the children's book The Farthest Shore. Her other works include poetry, stories (collected in The Wind's Twelve Quarters, 1975), essays on science fiction, and the novels Malafrena (1979) and The Compass Rose (1982).